“Why is Lauren’s dad a Phillies fan?” Sam asked. “I thought he and Lauren came here from D.C.”

“Her dad grew up in Philadelphia,” Dani said. “He talked about the Phillies all the time. He said they’re the oldest team in the country.”

She sat down on the floor against one of the arcade machines. She leaned back into it, shut her eyes and sighed. The opposite of hope, captured in a single sound.

Sam crossed to a bay window near the pool table. The Colemans’ back yard was one story lower than the front yard, allowing for the full-sized window. Sam stood there looking out; the view was about the same as from his own bedroom: south over the grassy slope and downtown Ashland.

“I remember them packing up, that last night,” Dani said. “They got everything done but these last few things down here. They were going to grab this stuff in the morning. The posters, the baseballs. That was going to be it.”

Sam found his thoughts sticking on the baseballs again, for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down. He wondered if Lauren’s dad had ever played the game.

Sam had played, back in L.A. Three years in Little League. His batting was only above average, but he could pitch with the best of them. His fastball topped out at seventy-three miles per hour, and the Junior League coaches had shown up to watch him practice a few times. They’d said he had promise. One more aspect of his old life that wasn’t going to matter around here.

“I wonder when it happened,” Dani said. Her tone was flat and detached. The voice of wrung-out, frayed nerves.

Sam turned to her. “When what happened?”

“The abduction. Like … later that same night, after I left? Or maybe the next morning.”

“No sheets or blankets on the beds upstairs,” Sam said. “Were they still on, when you were here that night?”

She narrowed her eyes, going back in time in her memory.

“Yeah,” she said. “So … they were kidnapped in the morning. They got up and took the sheets and blankets off and packed them away, and it happened sometime after that.”

“I guess,” Sam said. He wasn’t sure why she was dwelling on those things.

“It means they were awake,” Dani said. “It wasn’t like somebody picked the lock and came in at three in the morning. Lauren and her dad were already up and around … and someone just came in and took them.”

“Okay,” Sam said.

“What if Lauren was down here when it happened? Getting ready to pack up this last stuff?”

For the first time since they’d found the fax machine missing, Dani’s voice had perked up again. Her eyes, too. They were alive. Intense.

“How could we know that, either way?” Sam asked.